recollections of george orwell

8/9/2019 Recollections of George Orwell

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R E O L L E T I O N S O F G E O R G E O R W E L L

George Woodcock

Imagine Don Q uixote without his horse and his drooping

whiskers, and you will get a fair idea of what G eorge Orwell looked like. He

was a tall and angular man, with a worn Gothic face that was elongated

by vertical furrows at the corners of the mouth. His rather narrow upper lip

was ado rned by a thin line of moustache, and the gene ral gauntness of his

looks was accentuated by the deep sockets from which his eyes looked out

sadly.

I first met O rwell during the early years of the last war, when he w as

working at the Indian Department of the B.B.C. in London. He had sent

me an invitation to take part in a discussion panel on poe try which he was

organizing, and, since w e had recently indulged in a rather v iolent dispute

in the

Partisan Review,

I was a little surprised at such an approach. But

I agreed, mostly, I think, to show that I bore as few ill feelings as Orwell

himself evidently did.

A few days later I went along to the improvized wartime studio in a

former O xford Street bargain basement. Orwell was there, as well as Mulk

Raj Anand, Herbert Read and William Empson, whom I already knew,

and Edmund Blunden, whom I had not met before. The program turned

out to be a made-up discussion which Orw ell had prepared skilfully before-

hand and w hich the rest of the participants were given a c hance to am end

before it wen t on the air. All of us objected to sm all points, as a ma tter of

principle, but the only major change occurred when Orwell himself pro-

duced a volume of B yron and, smiling around at the rest of us, suggested

that we should read The Isles of Greece. At that time the British gov-

ernment was officially opposed to the Indian independence movement

(Gandhi was still in prison), and as the ringing verses of rev olt were read

the program assumed a mild flavor of defiance which we all enjoyed.

Orwell, I noticed, had a very rough-and-ready idea of radio production,

and his own level voice was not effec tive for broadcasting. Afterwards w e

Reprinted with permission from

Northern Review,

published in Montreal,

Canada.

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went to a tavern in Great Portland Street frequented by broadcasting men,

where Orwell discoursed cynically on the futility of the trouble we had

taken over a program to which he doubted if more than two hundred

Angloph ile Indians would bother to listen. He was already feeling the frus-

tration of a job that was mostly concentrated on the dissemination of official

propaganda. By the next time I saw him, during 1943 , he had resigned from

the BBC and become the literary editor of the Tribune, a socialist review

which upheld the Bevanite wing of the Labor Party and at that time was

sharply critical of the Churchill government.

On this occasion I encountered Orwell on the top of a bus at Hamp-

stead Heath. He immediately began to talk about the journalistic disagree-

ments which had preceded our actual meeting. There's no reason to let

that kind of argument on paper breed personal ill feeling, he said. This

disarming remark was typical of O rwell's attitude towards opponents with

whom he found some common ground of liberal humanity or intellectual

scrupulousness. He was ready to fight out debatable ideas in a bold and

slashing m anner that was reminiscent of the nineteenth century polem icists,

but this did not prevent him from remaining on the friendliest personal

terms with his opponents, provided they were willing, which w as not always

the case. The only exception he seemed to make was towards the total-

itarians. His battle with them was whole-hearted, and I remember his

indignation when he once told me about a Communist poet who had

published a bitter personal attack on him a nd later tried to be affab le when

they met in a public house. To O rwell this seemed the grossest hypocrisy,

because he knew that the Stalinists detested him as one of their most dan-

gerous enemies.

Not long after my second meeting with Orwell, he told me that he had

just written a political fairy tale, for which he was then trying vainly to

find a publisher. I was connected with a small press, and he wondered

whether we might consider it. I mentioned the book to m y associates, but

none of them was particularly interested, and the suggestion was allowed

t

lapse. This was unfortunate, for the fairy tale was A nim al Farm ; Orwell's

difficulty in placing it was due more than any thing else to the widespread

feeling at the time that it was und iplomatic and even a little unpatriotic to

say very m uch in criticism of C omm unist Russia. One publisher, who has

since become prominent in his anti-Communism, put about a report that

the book was extreme and hysterical, and it was only after muc h ped-

dling and after he had thought of private publication, that Orw ell eventu-

ally persuaded Seeker and Warburg to bring out

Animal Farm. He and

his publishers were equa lly surprised when it turned out to be an interna-

tional best seller.

I began to see more of Orwell while he was working at the Tribune

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where, despite the paper's rather narrow political dogmatism, he opened

its literary pages to writers of all the left-of-center viewpoints. But his gen-

erosity too often submerged his discernment for him to be a rea lly effective

editor, and usually the most interesting page of the

Tribune was his own

week ly piece, As I Please, in which he discoursed on any facet of life or

letters that happened to strike his fancy. It was the best short essay w riting

of the Forties. Orw ell's versatility was astounding; he could alwa ys find a

subject on which there was som ething fresh to say in a prose that, for all its

ease and apparent casualness, was penetrating and direct.

M y ac quaintance w ith O rwell developed into friendship in the

latter part of 1944, mainly through a common concern for civil liberties.

As always happens in time of war, the more intransigeant minorities of

opinion were sometimes rather harshly treated, and their mem bers impris-

oned or otherwise discriminated against. There w as a great deal of discus-

sion on this point among the English intellectals. Som e claimed that free-

dom of criticism and protest should be temporarily relinquished in safe-

guarding what they regarded as greater freedoms. Others, including Orwell

and most of his friends, held with varying degrees of emphasis that the

liberties of speech and w riting could only be abandoned with danger to the

general climate o f intellectual life.

The issue was given added importance through the attitude of the

National Council for Civil Liberties, which had becom e largely infiltrated

by C omm unists and fellow travellers and was almost completely inactive

in protecting non-Communists. The matter came to a head when three

editors of a minority paper w ere sent to gaol for pub lishing anti-war views.

A committee which had been formed to defend them was perpetuated to

deal with other similar issues, and, under the name of the Freedom D efence

Com mittee, led a precarious but active existence from 194 4 until 194 9. Its

leading mem bers were a mixed group of intellectuals, artists and political

workers drawn from ev ery group between the liberals and the anarchists;

only conservatives and communists were absent. Bertrand Russell, H. J.

Laski, E. M. Forster, Herbert Read, Cyril Connolly, Benjamin Britten,

Henry Moore, O sbert Sitwell and Augustus John were among its supporters,

and O rwell became vice-chairman. I recollect that when I transmitted the

Comm ittee's invitation to him he was at first hesitant about accepting. I

don't want to get back on the treadmill of administrative work, he said.

When I assured him that no great demands would be made on his time,

he agreed, and became, while his health allowed, m uch more helpful, both

materially and m orally, than his initial hesitation had led us to suppose. H e

wrote, advised and gave freely, occasionally he would buttonhole some influ-

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ential person we wished to interest, and on rare occasions he could be

persuaded to speak in public. A throat wound during the Spanish Civil

W ar had robbed his voice of resonance, but he spoke w ith such unpreten-

tious conviction that I never remem ber an audience treating him other than

with attention and respect. It was through our constant contact with

Orwell over such matters that my wife and I became friendly with him,

and our business conversations developed into more inform al and personal

meetings.

III

What made Orwell such an excellent journalist and also gave

his novels a reality that was much more than mere verisimilitude was his

intense interest in the concrete aspects of living, in the surface of life, as

he would say, and also the way in which his writing seemed to extend and

amplify his daily life and conversation. Now, when I re-read his books, I

am pe rpetually reminded of the talk on evenings we spent together, at our

respective homes, or sometimes dining in Soho and going on to the Cafe

Royal or some literary public house.

Orwell's own flat, where he lived with a small adopted son to whom

he was extravagantly devoted, was in Islington, perched high up under

the roof of a tall Georgian house in a square on the edge of a working class

district. It was a dark and almost dingy place, with a curious Englishness

of atmosphere. There was a great screen plastered with cut-outs from

magazines in the living room, on the w alls hung Victorian portraits murky

with bituminous shadow, and a c ollection of china m ugs, celebrating vari-

ous popular nineteenth century festivals, crowded on top of the c ramm ed

bookshelves. By the fireplace stood a high-back ed wicker arm-chair, of an

angularly austere shape I have seen nowhere else, and here Orwell himself

would sit. His study looked like a w orkshop; he was very fond of manual

work, and w hen he was in London w ould often do some joinery as a relaxa-

tion from writing.

I do not think Orwell was entirely indifferent to comfort, but he cer-

tainly set no great store by appearances, and his times of hardship had

given him an easy c ontempt for the trappings of the bourgeois life. H is way

of dressing even when he was earning well, remained that of the poorer

English intellectuals, and I never saw him clad otherwise than in baggy,

grubby corduroys, a worn tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows,

and shoes which were never very w ell polished. John Morris, who disliked

Orw ell, wrote in

Penguin New Writing

an essay wh ich suggested that this

sartorial carelessness was an aspect of a ch ildish and self-conscious rebellion

against the standards of polite behavior. It always seemed to me that, hav-

ing once escaped from middle class manners, O rwell just did not find them

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worth the trouble of resuming. Certainly he practised no self-conscious

Spartanism, and on the few occasions when we visited fairly expensive

restaurants together, I noticed that he enjoyed the food as w ell as anybody

else. He seemed to have naturally modest physical needs, though he never

rejected good when it came his way.

Whenever one arrived at Orwell's flat, or when he cam e wheezing up

the stairs to one's own, there was at first a period of relative silence, for

Orwell, though a gregarious, was also a reserved man . Then, after a while,

the conversation would start, over a meal, or sitting before a coal or peat

fire, with Orw ell rolling cigarettes of the strongest black shag he could find

and drinking tea almost as thick as treacle. Sometimes the talk would

develop into a mono logue on his part. H e had lived a very varied life, had

been a policeman in Burma, a dishwasher in Paris, a bum and a grocer in

England, had fought in Spain against Franco and lived for a while in

M orocco. And he would tell of his experiences in such an entertaining way

that one rarely had the least desire to interrupt him. His voice was rather

flat, with the slight vestige of an E ton accent, but it had a m onotonous k ind

of fascination and seem ed to throw into relief the vividness of his descrip-

tions. At other times we would converse on the strangest variety of subjects,

and, however banal our text, Orwell would usually discuss it with such

humor and thoroughness that he managed to lift it right out of its pristine

dullness. For instance, we w ould talk about tea, and ways of mak ing it, or

about com ic postcards, and he would b ring in such a wealth of illustration

and reminiscence and odd tags of information that one was stimulated to

enter into the subject with as much zest as he. And then, a week or two

later, one would find that this conversation had become a part of his writing,

and formed the basis of a leisurely, fascinating essay in some newspaper or

magazine.

At yet other times, the conversation would range over deeper matters,

and O rwell would expound his fears of the future of society, and dilate on

the way in which the concern for freedom and truth had grown weak in

popular consciousness, as we ll as in literature and po litics. In this way he

told us all the basic ideas of his masterpiece,

Nineteen Eighty Four,

though,

with a charac teristic modesty, he talked little of the book itself, and until I

saw it finally in print, I had only the slightest idea of the plot. When he

talked on such theses he could paint a really horrifying picture of the fate

that might befall us. After such a session Herbert Read, who himself is not

exactly a light-hearted man, once said to me: My God, Orwell is a gloomy

bird " And often, indeed, it did seem as though one had been listening to

the voice of Jeremiah.

Apart from his accent, the only characteristic of the public school back-

ground that Orwell seemed to have retained was his emotional stoicism of

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behavior. Even his anger w as demonstrative only on paper, and, while his

generosity and consideration for other people indicated the presence of deep

feelings, he showed them rarely. He w as certainly interested in women, but

he never displayed the fact, and one unusually beautiful girl remarked to

me that O rwell was the only one among her male acquaintances who never

made her feel that he was aware of her as a wom an.

IV

During 1946 Orwell bought a house on the Isle of Jura in the

He brides, to which he w ould retire for months on end. F rom this time on-

ward w e saw little of him, but letters frequen tly arrived in which he gave

vivid pictures of his life there and kept us posted on his activities. In

August, 194 6, for instance, he told me that he had just started a new novel,

which he hoped to finish during the following year. It became

Nineteen

Eighty Four

and was destined to be his final book. A month later he sent

a lengthy description of life on the island; the following passage shows the

intense interest he always took in the concrete aspects of the life that went

on around him and also in its social undertones.

W e have been helping the crofter who is our only neighbor with his

hay and corn, at least when rain hasn't made it impossible to work. Eve ry-

thing is done here in an incredibly primitive way. Even when the field is

ploughed with a tractor the seed is still sown broadcast, then scythed and

bound up into sheaves by hand . They seem to broadcast corn, i.e., oats, all

over Scotland, and I must say they seem to get it almost as even as can be

done by a machine. Owing to the wet they don't get the hay in till about

the end of September, or even later, sometimes as late as November, and

they can't leave it in the open but have to store it all in lofts. A lot of the

corn doesn't quite ripen and is fed to the cattle in sheaves like hay. The

crofters have to work very hard, but in many ways they are better off and

more independent than a town laborer, and they would be quite com-

fortable if they could get a bit of help in the way of machinery, electrical

power and roads, and could get the landlords off their backs and get rid

of the deer. These anima ls are so comm on on this particular island that they

are an absolute curse. They eat up the pastures where there ought to be

sheep, and they make fencing imm ensely more expensive than it need be.

The crofters aren't allowed to shoot them, and are constantly having to

waste their time dragging carcases of deer down from the hills during the

stalking season. Everything is sacrificed to the brutes because they are an

easy source of meat and therefore profitable to the people who own them .

I suppose sooner or later these islands w ill be taken in hand, and then they

could either be turned into a first-rate area for dairy produce and m eat, or

else they would support a large population of small peasants living off cattle

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and fishing. In the 18th century the population here was 10,000 now less

than 300.

Towards the end of 194 6 the only large independent left-wing bookstore

in London was bought out by the Com munists. Orwell was appalled when

I wrote him the news and im mediately replied with a scheme for setting up

a rival concern to m aintain an outlet for individual publications. In a period

of poverty, he had worked as salesman in a Ham pstead bookshop, and now

he was full of ideas as to how a new store might be run efficiently and inde-

pendently. N othing came of the project, and I think the letter he wrote on

this occasion was intrinsically m ore interesting for some comm ents on his

own w orks which illustrate the rigorously self-critical standards he set himself.

I was then studying his books, and I had asked whether he could lend me a

copy of a relatively Iittle known novel he had written in the 1930 's,

eep the

Aspidistra Flying. I

haven't a copy of `Keep the Aspidistra Flying, ' he

answered. I picked up a copy in a secondhand shop some months back, but

I gave it away. There are two or three books which I am ashamed of and

have not allowed to be reprinted or translated, and that is one of them.

There is an even w orse one called `A C lergyman's Daughter.' This was w rit-

ten simply as an exercise, and I oughtn't to have published it, but I was

desperate for money , ditto when I wrote `K eep the A.' At that time I simply

hadn't a book in me, but I w as half starved and had to turn out something to

bring in 100

or so.

Actually, both books would have satisfied any ordinary journeyman

writer, and Orw ell's remarks show the seriousness with which he took h is

literary cra ftsmanship. His writing seemed e ffortless, but it was only so be-

cause of the exacting discipline he imposed on structure and verbal texture

alike.

Orwell spent the winter of 194 6-7 in L ondon, but in the following spring

he left once more for the Hebrides, and we never saw him again. Letters

followed each other during the summer. Looking through them, I find

Orwell approving my own intention to write a book on W ilde. I've always

been very pro-Wilde, he commented. I particularly like `Dorian Gray,'

absurd as it is in a way. I suspect that Orwell's liking for Wilde was based

mostly on his natural sympathy for the defeated, since there is certainly little

in common between the close discipline of his own work and the lushness of

Wilde's, except perhaps a shared liking for surface color.

During these months, Orwell was work ing with difficulty on

Nineteen

Eighty Four,

which he did not expec t to finish before the following spring.

It always takes me a hell of a time to write a book even if I am doing noth-

ing else, and I can't help doing an occasional article, usually for some Am eri-

can magazine, because one must earn some money occasionally.

It was at this time that Orwell took a decision which many of his friends

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regarded w ith disquiet. He announced that, apart from a trip to London in

November, he intended to stay in the Hebrides over the winter. With his

precarious health and his previous attacks of tuberculosis, it seemed rash

indeed for him to remain in the damp fall and winter climate of the Isles, but

he was the kind of man with whom, one knew beforehand, it would be useless

to argue once he had made up his mind. Moreover, he seemed already to

have though t of plenty of reasons for staying, and he detailed them to m e

in a letter which made me feel his real mo tive was that infatuation with the

semi-idyllic life of remote and fairly primitive com munities which at times

seizes dem andingly on c ity-tired intellectuals... .

In any event, O rwell did not get away from Scotland at all that winter.

His health had been poor all summer, and in October it was probably

made worse by a fishing accident in which his boat capsized and he and his

small son were almost drowned. A little while after this it became evident

that he was seriously ill with tuberculosis in the left lung. He was bedridden

at home for two months, and when he next wrote me in January, 1948, it

was from a hospital in Lanarkshire to which he had been removed a fort-

night previously. I have felt a bit less like death since being here, he re-

marked stoically, and he was hopeful of being about again by the summ er

and of getting a correspondent's job in a warm climate during the winter.

Sickness did not diminish Orwell's interest in what went on around

him, he was still much concerned about civil liberties. A purge of Com-

munists in the British civil service began early in 19 48, and, in spite of his

hostility to Communism, Orwell thought that the methods of the govern-

ment, which did not allow suspects to confront their accusers, formed a dan-

gerous precedent. I think his words speak for themselves on this important

issue.

It is not easy to have a clear position, he said, because, if one admits

the right of governments to govern, one must admit their right to choose

suitable agents, and I think any organization, e.g., a political party, has a

right to protect itself against infiltration. But at the same time, the

way

in

which the government seems to be going to work is vaguely disquieting, and

the whole phenomenon seem s to me part of the general breakdown of the

democratic outlook. Only a week or two ago the Comm unists were shouting

for unconstitutional methods to be used against the Fascists, now the same

methods are to be used against themselves, and in another year or two a

pro-Communist government might be using them against us. Meanwhile

the general apathy about freedom of speech, etc., constantly grows, and

that matters more than what may be on the statute books.

During the spring and early summ er of 1948 O rwell seemed to be re-

covering, and in July he told us that he was going back to Jura. They seem

to think I am pretty w ell cured and will end up perfectly O .K. so long as I

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do'n't relapse during the next few months." As soon as he returned to the

Isles he resumed w ork on

Nineteen Eighty Four. By Septem ber his condi-

tion had begun to worsen , but, though he was in what he called a ghastly

state, he did not leave the island for treatment until Decem ber; he insisted

on finishing his novel beforehand. The effort of doing so didn't ma ke me

any better," he said. He certainly seemed moved by an obstinate sense of

compulsion, and I have since felt that he knew he was unlikely to recover

and wished to present in a complete form the book that was to be his testa-

ment.

I heard from him for the last time early in 1949. He had now gone to a

sanatorium in Gloucestershire. He seemed contented there, and something

of the grim old Orwellian humor came back w hen he discussed his treatment.

They are giving me something called P.A.S. which I suspect of being a high-

sounding name for aspirins, but they say it is the latest thing and gives good

results. If necessary I can have another go o f streptomycin, which certainly

seemed to improve m e last time, but the secondary effects are so unpleasant

that it's a bit like sinking the ship to drown the rats. He was still interested

in the affairs of the Freedom D efence C omm ittee, which was waning fast

from the sheer lack of enough supporters who at that time realized the need

for a c ivil liberties organization untrammeled by party ties.

In the spring of 1949 my wife and I left England for Canada ( The

sort of country that could be fun for a bit, especially if you like fishing,"

Orwell had com mented when he heard of our plans), and we never seemed

able to find the time for a trip to Gloucestershire before we went. It was one

of those omissions one regrets after it cannot be rectified. After we reached

Canada I wrote a couple of times to Orwell, but he was too sick to reply.

W e heard that he w as getting worse and had gone into a London hospital,

and then, at a Vancouver party one snowy evening in the first days of 1950 ,

one of the guests came in and told me that Orwell was dead.

V

Since that time an image seems to have grown up in the popular

mind, particularly in countries where his earlier books have been compara-

tively little read, of O rwell as a writer whose m ain message was one of anti-

Com munism. In fact, he had little in comm on with those frightened medi-

ocrities who have nothing to offer but a negative opposition to the totali-

tarians. It is true that from many reviews of

Nineteen Eighty Four

one

might gain the impression that it was devoted entirely to an attack on C om-

munism, or even to an exposure of left-wing politics in general. Neither

impression would be true.

Orwell did, indeed, detest the methods of the Communists, because

he regarded them as both tyrannical and dishonest, and he saw in Russia

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an extreme example of the suppression of those humanist virtues which

seemed to him essential for healthy social life. But it was only the most

extreme, and not the only exam ple, for he observed everyw here in contem-

porary politics the fatal tendency to displace in favor of expediency the

necessary virtues of honesty and fair play. H e gave a rather nominal sup-

port to the British Labor Government, but he realized that there also the

dangers outlined in

Nineteen Eighty Four

existed, and his warning should be

regarded as applying to any society where the cult of the state becomes m ore

important than the welfare of individual men. Everyw here he saw, in vary-

ing degrees, that steady erosion of the personality whose f inal stage is, after

all, the subject of his last novel.

O rwell, more than m ost of his contemporaries, represented in our time

M atthew Arnold's conception of the man who is:

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born.

In many respects he was a survivor of the free-fighting liberals of the nine-

teenth century, a partisan of the values which m en like Emerson, Thoreau

and Dickens strove to maintain. But he also looked to a future in which

he hoped men might outlive the night of tyranny and falsehood, of

ignorance and mediocrity, into which we so often seem to be passing. None,

indeed, knew better than he how heavy the odds were against such a hope,

but he still thought it was worth fighting for with all the indignation and

humanity of his nature.

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recollections of george orwell

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